Philosophy, Theory, and Foundations in Education

Across a myriad of standardized cognitive tests, racial and ethnic groups differ (Jencks and Phillips, 1998; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 2003). The mission of ‘participants’ in the race and intelligence debate is to explain why such gaps exist—so that they may be closed if at all possible. The Debate seems, however, mired in the persistent use of scientifically invalid, misleading, and antiquated constructs, and methodology—I.e., the belief in the existence of human races, IQ heritability, and the nature versus nurture paradigm (Block, 2002; Fish, 2002; Graves, 2004; Horn, 2002). The driving undercurrent appears to be conservative and liberal ideological approaches to what race is and what it means for human mental capabilities. An ideology is a system of beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions which guide individual and group behavior (Marger 2002: 379). An ideology may rationalize a culture’s structures of power and privilege. It is ‘faith’ based, and usually unrelated and/or unresponsive to empirical facts.

The “race” component of the Debate entails a non-existent entity: there are no substantive human races (Fish, 2002: 114; Graves, Jr. 2004: 2; Venter 2000:www.genome.gov). The heritability of human traits, like intelligence or IQ, are not fixed (Lewontin 1995). That is to say that there is no intrinsic heritability value for IQ, or any other human characteristic. And perhaps most importantly, the correct way of conceptualizing the intricate nexus between organisms’ phenotypes, genotypes, constituent environments is not ‘nature versus nurture,’ but a phenomenon called the norm of reaction (Lewontin, p. 21).